Top 100 Photography Is Art Quotes
#1. Now people ask whether photography is art, but I think the question is of absolutely no interest.
Peter Lindbergh
#2. Photography is art when it's used by an artist.
Ruth Bernhard
#3. A few words about the question of whether photography is art or not: I never understood the question.
Ernst Haas
#4. Street photography is art and if art is a crime, please God, forgive me.
Thomas Leuthard
#5. The key is to integrate our art into our life, not the other way around.
Brooks Jensen
#6. Speed, the fundamental condition of the activities of our day is the power of photography, indeed the modern art of today, the art of the split second.
Lisette Model
#7. One thing that struck me early is that you don't put into a photograph what's going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.
Diane Arbus
#8. The art of news photography is creating compelling, graphic compositions that communicate environment and emotion. Strung together, they take the viewer on a progression of discovery until the mystery is revealed.
Rich Underwood
#10. There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste
Helmut Newton
#11. What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
Karl Lagerfeld
#12. It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)
Alphonse De Lamartine
#13. To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.
Edward Weston
#14. If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must ... intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses.
Henri Matisse
#15. An artist's job is to inspire, from the Latin inspirare: to breathe into. The primary function of art is to inspire new thought shaped by emotions using the creative mediums we master - be it painting, music, design, craft, or photography.
Anonymous
#16. We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.
Michelangelo Antonioni
#18. I like to work in the real world, so I do a lot of searching or just simple looking. But I'm not above tweaking reality and making something up. I don't think there are any rules in art. It's not so much what you see as it is the significance you, the artist, see in it.
Keith Carter
#19. The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial ... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.
Clement Greenberg
#20. It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about.
Helen Levitt
#21. Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question.
James Turrell
#22. A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.
Annie Leibovitz
#23. One of art photography's most vigorous enterprises
[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate
but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
Susan Sontag
#24. Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form.
Shannon L. Alder
#25. It is my hope that photography may fall in line with all the other arts and with her infinite possibilities, do things strange and more fascinating than the most fantastic dreams.
Alvin Langdon Coburn
#26. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.
Charles Baudelaire
#27. Photography, when used as a representational art, is not a mere copy of nature. This is proved by the rarity of the 'good' photograph.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#28. Contemporary art photography is paradoxical. Anyone can look at it and form an opinion about what they see. Yet it usually represents aesthetic and theoretical positions that only a small minority of well-informed viewers can access.
Lucy Soutter
#29. Photography is the dominant and fascinating and only folk art of the twentieth century.
John Rothenstein
#31. Is photography art? ... The pure definition of the word 'art' alone is too vague today to break one's brain and soul about it. Let us take a little vacation from this word.
Ernst Haas
#32. What's so incredibly amusing with photography is that while seemingly an art of the surface, it catches things I haven't even noticed. And it pains me not to have seen things in all their depth.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue
#33. Not only has photography so thoroughly saturated our visual environment as to make the invention of visual images seem archaic, but it is also clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained within traditional definitions of art.
Douglas Crimp
#34. The discussion about whether photography is or isn't art is dated and of no interest. Your work makes you an artist, not your title.
Peter Lindbergh
#35. Photography is an itch that wont go away. No matter how much you scratch it.
Dara McGrath
#36. But O, Photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing!
Philip Larkin
#38. Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
#39. Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#40. I've always thought photography is not so much of an art form but a way of communicating and passing on information.
Don McCullin
#41. Photography is an art of observation - it's about creating something extraordinary out of the ordinary. You choose a frame and then wait until the right time for something magical to come along and fill it.
Elliott Erwitt
#43. It cannot be too plainly stated that it is quite unimportant whether photography produces 'art' or not. Its own basic laws, not the opinions of art critics, will provide the only valid measure of its future worth.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#44. Above all, the photographs I use are not arty in any sense of the word. I think photography is dead as fine art; its only place is in the commercial world, for technical or information purposes.
Edward Ruscha
#46. When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but ... my portrait is a culmination of elements ... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot.
Jamie Wyeth
#47. The painters have no copyright on modern art! ... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.
Edward Weston
#48. For half a century photography has been the "art form" of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? to the finger on the button? to the law of averages?
Gore Vidal
#49. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
Susan Sontag
#50. If art is the poetic interpretation of nature, photography is the exact translation; it is exactitude in art or the complement of art. (1854)
Charles Negre
#51. A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.
George Bernard Shaw
#52. I've spent most of my life embracing violence in wars and revolutions. Even a famine is a form of violence. Because I photograph people in peril, people in pain, people being executed in front of me, I find it very difficult to get my head around the art narrative of photography.
Don McCullin
#53. Outstanding past work in photography, and in fact in all the arts, is very important to today's photographers. But it should be used for inspiration and not for imitation. These works should be something to be built upon, not to be repeated.
Alexey Brodovitch
#54. Photography is a unique art that allows people to go back, not only to rediscover themselves but also to get something in print for the first time.
David Travis
#55. To make the essence of man visible in the exposure is the highest art of photography.
Friedrich Durrenmatt
#56. What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
John Berger
#57. Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it's instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth.
Gregory Crewdson
#58. To me, photography is not just a visual art, but something closer to poetry - or at least to some poetry, such as the haiku.
Frank Horvat
#59. You are either born to be a photographer or not. The art of photography is not something you can learn in the classroom or by watching someone do it.
Nobuyoshi Araki
#60. I understood the craft of photography when done by an artist is art.
Ruth Bernhard
#61. The art is the challenge which you must meet every day: the technique you should learn to control with time. The science and the art of photography are really one, and not opposed to each other.
Yousuf Karsh
#62. There is always a subjective aspect in landscape art, something in the picture that tells us as much about who is behind the camera as about what is in front of it.
Robert Adams
#63. Photography is better than art. It is a solar phenomenon in which the artist collaborates with the sun.
Alphonse De Lamartine
#64. If the photographer isn't going to pay attention to the picture he is making, that if he thinks the camera is just a machine and not an avenue of expression, then he has no business asking anyone for anything, let alone their time and interest. Don't show the world, he said, invent the world.
Whitney Otto
#65. The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me.
Tom Carter
#66. There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.
Sontag, Susan
#67. I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.
Carl Andre
#69. The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
Steven Pinker
#70. A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.
Ansel Adams
#72. PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.
Ambrose Bierce
#73. The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
Susan Sontag
#74. No one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good photograph or a bad photograph ... This is why the art world will not throw billions of dollars at photography the way it has at painting; and that is what makes it an exciting medium.
David Wojnarowicz
#75. Photography is the art of anticipation, not working with memories, but showing their formation. As such, it has relentlessly usurped imaginative and critical prerogatives of older, slower literature and handmade visual art.
Peter Schjeldahl
#76. To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#77. Photography is just a medium. It's like a typewriter. Photography as an art doesn't interest me an awful lot; as a participant, though I like to look at it.
Ezra Stoller
#78. Art can no longer be merely a mirror, it must act as the organizer of the people's consciousness ... No form of representation is so readily comprehensible to the masses as photography.
El Lissitzky
#79. Your most important gear is your eye, heart and soul.
Marius Vieth
#80. Is photography an art? There is no point in trying to find out if it is an art. Art is old-fashioned. We need something else.
Man Ray
#81. Only in black and white can I see the design and textures. I don't consider color photography art. Black and white is an interpretation. Color is a duplication.
Clyde Butcher
#83. All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.
Ansel Adams
#84. Nature is beautiful in all its chaos. However, a nature photograph is beautiful only in the absence of chaos.
Mike MacDonald
#85. I have been using the art of photography to research the ways in which the pictorial strategies of the Nineteenth Century color the way in which the American landscape is apprehended by today's viewers.
John Pfahl
#86. Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt.
Walker Evans
#87. Don't we all know that art is dangerous. You play it - then you live it.
Stefan Balint
#88. Real photography is a wonderfully inclusive, democratic medium, whereas art photography is more often a private pursuit by conmen.
Philip Jones Griffiths
#89. Photography is a witness against the mistaken opinion that art is an imitation of nature.
Heinrich Heine
#90. The battle for the acceptance of photography as Art was not only counter-productive but counter-revolutionary. The most important photography is most emphatically not Art.
A. D. Coleman
#91. I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.
Walker Evans
#92. Art is a discovery of harmony, a vision of disparities reconciled, or shape beneath confusion.
Robert Adams
#93. Art does not in fact prove anything. What it does do is record one of those brief times, such as we each have and then each forget, when we are allowed to understand that the Creation is whole.
Robert Adams
#94. What is important is that our optical awareness rids itself of classical notions of beauty and opens itself more and more to the beauty of the instant and of these surprising points of view that appear for a brief moment and never return; those are what make photography an art.
Raoul Hausmann
#95. Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
Susan Sontag
#96. For me, pointing and clicking my phone is absolutely fine. People say that isn't the art of photography but I don't agree.
Annie Lennox
#97. Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.
Alfred Stieglitz
#98. The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.
Edward Steichen
#99. I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography - that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.
Joel Meyerowitz
#100. I cannot understand why some people try to write a history of photography that is separated from the history of modern art.
Jean-Francois Chevrier
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